Complexity Rising: Study Finds Many Enterprise IT Professionals Manage 20 or More Different Storage Systems

Over Half of Respondents Surveyed Manage 10 or More Different Storage Systems, Over Two-Thirds Manage Hardware from Three or More Vendors

LOS
ALTOS – April 12, 2016 – Data virtualization
innovator Primary Data today
announced the results of a recent survey of IT industry professionals that
underscores the increasing complexity of today’s enterprise storage landscape.
As new solutions such as all-flash systems, cloud storage, and emerging
technologies like hyperconverged storage are adopted alongside traditional SAN
and NAS storage, 51 percent of the IT administrators surveyed report managing
10 or more different storage systems, while one-third of the respondents
reported overseeing more than 20 different storage resources.

“The results of this survey echo what we have been
hearing from customers: Enterprises have many storage options, but need a way
to finally integrate the diverse capabilities of their storage investments to
meet evolving business needs,” said Lance Smith, Primary Data CEO. “The Primary
Data DataSphere platform is a software-defined solution that enables
enterprises to finally put all of their different storage resources to work
efficiently by uniting storage silos within a single, global dataspace. By
moving data automatically to the right type of storage for dynamic business requirements
across performance, protection and price, enterprises gain the flexibility and
agility needed to meet modern datacenter demands.”

The anonymous survey respondents were primarily
based in the United States, and work at companies ranging from over 100 to more
than 5,000 employees. The largest enterprises most commonly reported having
over 20 different storage systems to manage. However, even smaller companies reported
significant storage diversity, underscoring how growing businesses today
leverage numerous storage options to meet different needs. Twenty-eight percent of the respondents
reported managing two to four storage systems, 22 percent reported supporting
five to nine systems, and the remaining 51 percent managed ten or more
different storage products. While 36 percent of those surveyed reported having
one or two storage vendors, nearly two-thirds of the professionals
participating in the survey reported using storage systems from three to nine
different providers.

The
Primary Data DataSphere platform is a storage-independent solution that
overcomes the challenges of maintaining multiple separate storage systems by uniting
existing storage silos in a single, global dataspace through data
virtualization. The DataSphere platform uniquely provides an abstraction layer
that separates the data path from the control path to create a dataspace that
connects different storage types and access protocols across file, block and
object storage. IT professionals set data objectives that then ensure data is
automatically placed on the right storage, at the right place, at the right
time, to meet business objectives. This simplifies data management across all
primary and secondary storage systems, from flash to SAN and NAS storage to the
cloud, creating pools of resources that are easy to monitor, maintain, and
scale.

“IDC believes a fundamental
characteristic of SDS is that the software stack (controller software) is fully
decoupled from the underlying hardware,” noted Ashish Nadkarni, IDC Program
Director in the report, Software-Defined Storage: Market
Background, Trends, and Taxonomy, 2015.“This means that the SDS controller software makes no assumption
of the underlying hardware and therefore can run on any type of hardware
platform.”

The DataSphere architecture leverages the
IDC-supported approach to software-defined storage to help enterprises maximize
the value of the storage they already have, while enabling companies to scale
simply to meet future demands. To add more capacity or performance, storage
administrators simply add new resources to the DataSphere global dataspace.
DataSphere then automates the movement of data to the new storage to maximize
efficiency across all resources in the global dataspace, greatly simplifying
the complexity of managing today’s diverse enterprise storage landscapes.

With the Primary
Data DataSphere platform, applications, servers, and clients gain the ability
to transparently access data while it is intelligently migrated between
direct-attached, network-attached, private and public cloud storage to deliver
unprecedented manageability, performance, and efficiency. The storage-agnostic DataSphere
platform features an intelligent objective engine that automatically places
data on the right resources across file, block, and object storage to meet
evolving application requirements in real time. To learn more, visit us at www.primarydata.com or follow us on Twitter at @Primary_Data.